Privacy Protection for Smartphones: an Ontology-Based Firewall Johanne Vincent, Christine Porquet, Maroua Borsali, Harold Leboulanger
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Privacy Protection for Smartphones: An Ontology-Based Firewall Johanne Vincent, Christine Porquet, Maroua Borsali, Harold Leboulanger To cite this version: Johanne Vincent, Christine Porquet, Maroua Borsali, Harold Leboulanger. Privacy Protection for Smartphones: An Ontology-Based Firewall. 5th Workshop on Information Security Theory and Prac- tices (WISTP), Jun 2011, Heraklion, Crete, Greece. pp.371-380, 10.1007/978-3-642-21040-2_27. hal-00801738 HAL Id: hal-00801738 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00801738 Submitted on 18 Mar 2013 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution| 4.0 International License Privacy Protection for Smartphones: An Ontology-Based Firewall Johann Vincent, Christine Porquet, Maroua Borsali, and Harold Leboulanger GREYC Laboratory, ENSICAEN - CNRS University of Caen-Basse-Normandie, 14000 Caen, France {johann.vincent,christine.porquet}@greyc.ensicaen.fr, {maroua.borsali,harold.leboulanger}@ecole.ensicaen.fr Abstract. With the outbreak of applications for smartphones, attempts to collect personal data without their user’s consent are multiplying and the protection of users privacy has become a major issue. In this paper, an approach based on semantic web languages (OWL and SWRL) and tools (DL reasoners and ontology APIs) is described. The proposed se- mantic firewall takes its decisions (authorize or forbid some action) on the basis of a set of privacy protection rules grounded on two ontolo- gies respectively modeling identity of mobile phone’s users and privacy policies. To validate this ontology-based approach, a proof of concept involving a real privacy threat scenario is implemented in Java and the porting of the semantic firewall to the Android platform is outlined. Keywords: Privacy protection, ontologies, smartphones, semantic firewall. 1 Introduction In the past few years, the mobile market has rapidly evolved from feature phones to smartphones [1]. It is assumed that the smartphone market will continue to grow in the upcoming years [2]. That evolution is impacting the mobile appli- cation market. In particular, the distribution model is progressively switching from a market controlled by telecom operators to online markets such as the App Store or the Android Market. The result of this opening is the recent boom in the number of mobile applications. Since many of these applications are col- lecting personal data with or without the consent of the user [3], the issue of an enhanced protection of the user’s privacy must be addressed. In this paper, we claim that an ontology-based firewall can effectively protect the user’s digital identity and personal data. Ontologies provide a shared vocab- ulary, which can be used to model a domain, that is, the type of objects and/or concepts that exist, together with their properties and relations [4]. Thanks to an explicit knowledge representation of the data requested by any mobile appli- cation, the firewall can determine whether the application requests are permitted or forbidden, according to predefined customized security policies. C.A. Ardagna and J. Zhou (Eds.): WISTP 2011, LNCS 6633, pp. 371–380, 2011. c IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2011 372 J.Vincentetal. This paper is organized as follows. In section 2, several ontologies for digi- tal identity and privacy protection mechanisms are reviewed and discussed. In section 3, our approach to achieve privacy protection for smartphones is de- tailed: the global architecture of the firewall is described, as well as the two distinct ontologies that have been specified and implemented in OWL language [5]: one dealing with digital identity and the other with privacy concerns. In or- der to explain how the proposed firewall responds to a common privacy threat, a basic scenario using policy rules expressed in SWRL [6] (Semantic Web Rule Language) language is explained step by step and the porting of the semantic firewall to the Android platform is oulined. Conclusions and future work are giveninsection4. 2 Related Works 2.1 Protection on Smartphones To protect their operating systems from malicious software, operating system developers have implemented various protection mechanisms. On iOS or Black- Berry OS for instance, applications are made available to customers after going through an agrement process that verifies that they do not contain unwanted code. Android also encourages developers to sign their applications with a trusted certificate but it is not mandatory. In addition to this signature mechanism, Android and BlackBerry prompt the user with a manifest during the installation process. This manifest shows the permissions granted to the application and the user must accept them in order to install the application. The problem with that kind of protection is that users tend to accept the manifest without really assessing all its consequences. The BlackBerry OS tries to address this issue by allowing a modification of the permissions for each application outside the installation process. However, to our knowledge, there is no real-time privacy protection mech- anisms implemented on current platforms that can prevent an application to access specific data. 2.2 Identity Ontologies Before building a semantic firewall that can efficiently protect users from privacy breaches, an exhaustive record of all the data that need to be protected must be done. Thanks to their declarative form, ontologies are the best way to explicitly represent the manifold digital identity of users that are juggling daily with several avatars, nicknames, passwords, telephone numbers, email accounts, homepages and so on. On social networks, countless people are describing themselves and part of their private life on their home page. FOAF (Friend Of A Friend) uses W3C’s RDF technology to represent such information as an ontology [7]. The core of FOAF describes characteristics of people and social groups, the networking being achieved thanks to the foaf:knows property. In addition to the FOAF core Privacy Protection for Smartphones: An Ontology-Based Firewall 373 terms, one can also describe Internet accounts, mailboxes, homepages etc. This general-purpose ontology is well suited for social network identities but it lacks information regarding mobile phone identities. Some of this missing information can be found in the vCard file standard format for electronic business cards. vCards contain the user’s personal and professional affiliation, address and geolocalisation, email, URLs, photos, logos and even audio clips. They can be attached to email messages, directly embedded in web pages (hCard microformat for (X)HTML) or represented into XML/RDF. The corresponding ontology can be found in [8]. Thanks to that ontology, it is possible to specify fine grained information, for instance indicating that a phone number is also a fax number or telling which email address should be given preference to others. 2.3 Privacy Protection Ontology-Based Policies A policy is an enforceable, well-specified constraint on the performance of a machine-executable action by a subject in a given situation. Web semantic lan- guages are particularly suited for representing, reasoning and enforcing policies. Thanks to policies, it is possible to adapt the behaviour of a complex system without changing pieces of code. In [9], three approaches are compared and dis- cussed: Ponder, Rei and KaoS. Only the last two are ontology-based and are both written in OWL language. Rei [10] proposes an application-independent ontology to represent the con- cepts of rights, prohibitions, obligations and policy rules. It also includes a gen- eral class describing the action to be performed, together with preconditions, target objects and results. KaoS has been developed within the broad context of multiagent and distributed systems. It is a complete framework for domain and policy services. Among KaoS features, there is a GUI called KPAT (KAoS Policy Administration Tool) allowing people to manually specify, analyze, and modify authorization and obligation policies, thus hiding the complexities of OWL from end-users. Policy decisions are performed by so-called Guards that store precompiled policies and maintain a history of actions. KAoS framework is a very rich environment. However, a simplified framework without the multiagent paraphernalia would better suit our needs. 3 Our Approach Ourobjectiveistocreateasemanticfirewall between the applications and the private data of the smartphone owner. We use ontologies to represent both the concepts of identity and personal data and also to model privacy policies. The proposed firewall relies on those ontologies to block or authorize a request. A request consists in some actions performed by an agent on another agent data. In our model, the applications are issued by a service provider and we consider that the data requests are made on its behalf. 374 J.Vincentetal. 3.1 Architecture The global architecture (Figure 1) is grounded on a smartphone ontology written in OWL that includes